Jeff Vrabel: It's too hot to be funny

Monday

Jul 25, 2011 at 12:01 AMJul 25, 2011 at 12:14 PM

As a licensed Reformed Humor Professional — having graduated from a monthslong Comedy Immersion Program led at a secluded Wisconsin camp by Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who helpfully compelled me to Pray The Grim Away (incidentally, it's basically just 12-hour "Growing Pains" rerun marathons, save your money) — I can confirm that it's currently too blank-wording hot to be funny.

Jeff Vrabel

As a licensed Reformed Humor Professional — having graduated from a monthslong Comedy Immersion Program led at a secluded Wisconsin camp by Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who helpfully compelled me to Pray The Grim Away (incidentally, it's basically just 12-hour "Growing Pains" rerun marathons, save your money) — I can confirm that it's currently too blank-wording hot to be funny. Go ahead and fill in your own expletive there; the newspaper has rules about such things, though I'm guessing that most editors are too sweaty to care. (If you are having trouble finding just the right bad word, go outside in a pair of sweatpants and jog to the end of the block. By the time you return you will have thought of dozens.)

There is hot, and then there is slap-your-belly-and-run-to-your-mama hot. I don't want to turn this into a game of Heat Dome Story Trumping, but I live in South Carolina, where we routinely enjoy the kind of heat that makes grown conservatives go running to the government for Oscillating Fan handouts, the kind of heat where you go to get the mail and then stop on your way back to hallucinate. Within 12 seconds of going outside in South Carolina your clothes grow damp and heavy enough to make you feel like you're wearing a used beach towel. I recently saw a Facebook experiment in which some a friend's kids tried to literally fry an egg on the sidewalk, a plan that unfortunately foiled when the sidewalk liquefied. On the plus side, when it's this hot, you feel less weird having your morning margarita at work.

And this is bad news for Funny People, and also me, because humor dies in the heat, much like most of the former "plants" from my porch and apparently lizards, according to my driveway. Side note: How often are you supposed to water plants? Is it more than once every few months? Wow, plants are needy.

So, as a response, the balance of this column will be exclusively about things that aren't remotely funny, so you can read it without worrying that your body temperature will increase even one degree of Kelvin. See, We've started already. Is there anything less funny than the Kelvin scale? There is not. Well, maybe Frank Caliendo.

It is so hot that it is hot in North Dakota, which is one of our nation's three or four least-funny states, according to Dr. Bachmann and his staff of trained clowns (see what I did there). Nothing funny happens in North Dakota, even when it gets really hot. You would think there would at least be some good comic potential in moose wearing board shorts and Jimmy Buffett T-shirts, but frankly we don't even know if North Dakota has moose, and it is too hot for me to Google this question. If there is anyone reading in North Dakota, please let me know if you have moose. Or Jimmy Buffett T-shirts.

Also not funny: Debt ceiling negotiations. For a process in which grown men pout at each other like toddlers and one of the protagonists is a tangerine-colored man named "Boehner," these negotiations are alarmingly unfunny. Unless I am missing something, the negotiations boil down to determining which group of people will blame another group of people for the non-payments of soldiers and old people, two groups which are also routinely not funny, except for the cast of "MASH" and the Rolling Stones. There is, of course, no rush in attempting to offset complete hilarious grand-scale financial ruin, so if you guys could continue holding unfunny press conferences in which you whimper and pout and refuse even the slightest bit of compromise, we would appreciate it, because frankly it's too hot for us to care about a ruined nation. Even ours.

Also not funny: The NFL lockout, Brett Favre, the evil Rupert Murdoch people at the evil Rupert Murdoch papers (though parts of that are funny), Amy Winehouse, "Captain America," the end of the space shuttle program, that guy with the end-of-the-world cult who'll be back in like two months or whatever, planking, Google Plus, Eric Cantor and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Good Lord, this is a hot and depressing country. Who wants margaritas?

Jeff Vrabel has nine Jimmy Buffett T-shirts. He can be reached at http://jeffvrabel.com and followed at http://twitter.com/jeffvrabel.

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